| MikeB said: @ HappySquirrel Saying that the Hollywood processor is basically a particular PowerPC processor is exactly like saying that the Cell or Xenon processors are basically a particular PowerPC processor I don't know much about the Hollywood chip, but I know the Broadway chip is a PowerPC 750CL family chip. The Cell's PPE is very similar to a Xenon core, the interesting part of the PS3's Cell are the 7 powerful SPEs and their arrangement. |
One of the main reasons so many companies have been moving towards IBM for their embedded solutions is because IBM has designed their processors in a modular way so that they can be highly customized. This means that someone who needs a very inexpensive processor (for something like a dryer) can have a very scaled back feature set, while someone who is looking for more performance (HD image processing on a TV) can have an advanced feature set to get the highest performance to price ratio possible.
The Gekko processor was manufactured using a 180nm process while the Broadway processor was manufactured using a 90nm process, and the Gekko processor's die size has twice the area of the Broadway processor where a straight manufacturing process reduction (to 90nm) would produce a die size that was a quarter of the Gekko's processor; this means that the Broadway processor is (approximately) twice the size of the Gekko processor, which implies that the Broadway processor has heavy modifications which (should) make it much more powerful per clock cycle.
We really don't know what these modifications are, and without knowing that it is nearly impossible to determine how they have impacted the performance of the processor. If Nintendo doubled the on chip cache on the Broadway processor it is likely that the number of cache misses could be dramatically reduced and the processor would become far more efficient.
